Jules Romains ou la fragmentation comme mètis

The metamorphoses of the river-novel seem to condemn the novel to temporal linearity and thus a certain spatial narrowness. In Les Hommes de bonne volonté, Romains, on the contrary, fragments time into discontinuous instants, each of which is considered in the totality of its spatial reach. But even if it seeks to be tabular in its conception, the novel is always linear in its reception. A monadic logic of the puzzle thus replaces the hypostatic logic of synecdoche.